The Infiltrators

presented with the Houston Latino Film Festival

The Houston Cinema Arts Society (HCAS) is partnering with the Houston Latino Film Festival (HLFF) to present a week-long virtual run of The Infiltrators from Friday, May 15th to Thursday, May 21st, including a live virtual Q&A with directors Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera and Human Rights Advocate Antonio Arellano on Wednesday, May 20th at 7pm on the Houston Cinema Arts YouTube Page, moderated by HCAS Artistic Director Jessica Green and HLFF Programming Director Pedro Rivas.

Members get a $2 discount!

The Infiltrators is a docu-thriller that tells the true story of young immigrants who are detained by Border Patrol and thrown into a shadowy for-profit detention center - on purpose. Marco and Viri are members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group of radical DREAMers who are on a mission to stop unjust deportations. And the best place to stop deportations, they believe, is in detention. However, when Marco and Viri attempt a daring reverse ‘prison break,’ things don’t go according to plan. Weaving together documentary footage of the real infiltrators with re-enactments of the events inside the detention center, The Infiltrators tells an incredible and thrilling true story in a genre-defying new cinematic language.

Country, Year

United States,
2019

Director

Alex Rivera and Cristina Ibarra

Writer

Alex Rivera and Aldo Velasco

Cast

Maynor Alvarado, Mohammad Abdollahi, Roman Arabia, and Eddie Martinez

Producer

Cristina Ibarra, Alex Rivera, Darren Dean, and Daniel J. Chalfen

Language

English

Runtime

95 MINS, SECS

Genre

Documentary

Subject

Film

Event Type

Film

Special Guests

Cristina Ibarra

Cristina Ibarra’s twenty-year film practice visualizes a border-crossing storytelling aesthetic rooted in her homeland of the Texas-Mexico border. Ibarra’s new feature
documentary, The Infiltrators, is a docu-thriller about undercover undocumented activists. It won the NEXT Audience and Innovator Awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019. The New York Times calls her previous award-winning documentary about South Texas border royalty, Las Marthas, “a striking alternative portrait of border life.” It premiered on Independent Lens in 2014. Earlier, in 2008, USA Today described The Last Conquistador, her POV-broadcast feature documentary about a monumental sculptor with a tragic historical blindspot, as “heroic.” Her award-winning directorial debut, Dirty Laundry: A Homemade Telenovela, was broadcast on PBS. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, NYFA, CPB/PBS, the Latino Producers Academy, Firelight, the Sundance Women’s Initiative and Creative Capital, among others. Ibarra is a 2019 Soros Art and a Rauschenberg fellow.

Alex Rivera

Alex Rivera is a filmmaker who’s been telling new, urgent, and visually adventurous Latino stories for more than twenty years. His first feature film, a cyberpunk thriller set in Tijuana, Mexico, Sleep Dealer, won multiple awards at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, and was released theatrically in the U.S. Rivera’s second feature film, a documentary/scripted hybrid set in and around an immigration detention center, The Infiltrators, won both the NEXT Audience Award and the Innovator Award at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and will be released theatrically in 2020. The Infiltrators is being developed as a scripted TV series by Blumhouse Television. Rivera’s work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Open Society Institute, Creative Capital, and many others. Alex studied at Hampshire College, was the Rothschild Lecturer at Harvard University, and is currently a distinguished lecturer in Media Studies at Queens College.